Hope and Aesthetic Utility in Modernist Literature

<p>"Hope" and "modernism" are two words that are not commonly linked. Moving from much-discussed negative affects to positive forms of feeling, <i>Hope and Aesthetic Utility in Modernist Literature</i> argues that they should be. This book contends that much of modernist writing and thought reveals a deeply held confidence about the future, one premised on the social power of art itself. In chapters ranging across a diverse array of canonical writers – Henry James, D.W. Griffith, H.D., Melvin Tolson, and Samuel Beckett – this text locates in their works an optimism linked by a common faith in the necessity of artistic practice for cultural survival. In this way, the famously self-attentive nature of modernism becomes a means, for its central thinkers and artists, of reflecting on what DeJong calls aesthetic utility: the unpredictable, ungovernable capacity of the work of art to shape the future even while envisioning it.</p> <p>Acknowledgments</p><p></p><p>Introduction: The Contexts of Modernist Hope</p><p></p><p>Chapter One: The Image in the Mirror: Aesthetic Utility in Late James</p><p></p><p>Chapter Two: Screened Anxieties: Hope and Fear in D.W. Griffith’s <i>The Birth of a Nation</i></p><p></p><p>Chapter Three: Unpredictable Texts: H.D.’s Grammar of Creation</p><p></p><p>Chapter Four: Recovering Democracy: Unfashionable Hope in Melvin B. Tolson’s <i>Libretto for the Republic of Liberia</i></p><p></p><p>Chapter Five: Refusing Silence: Art as Deferment in <i>Waiting for Godot</i> and <i>Endgame</i></p><p></p><p>Coda: Legacies of Modernist Hope: Poetic Unknowing and the Call to Wonder</p>